Dear Mr Eliot

Dear Mr Eliot.


It is London and this a crueller month.
Row on row, the people go their slow way,
hunched beneath 'brollies that bend in the wind
like they've sucked in their black cheeks, shrinking in
towards the huddled bundle of blood-warmth
beneath. Let us go, 
darting through the crowded streets,
twisting round the wool-clad sheep, just laughing,
dancing as we go. 

Do you recall how
the cost of his words was silence,
stretched out like a lobotomised child?
Standing sedate with a wide lolling grin,
smiling, selfless, as if any thought could
ever have presumed to flitter through 
her small, stubborn mind. 
The hush hung over the girls sitting with us
as their empty, painted mouths hung open.
His flickering tongue played with his bottom lip,
then lifting his mug he took a sip
and he glanced first at you, then I. 
Imploring, not ashamed.

Do you remember the story of the girl unnamed? 
On the roof they sit in inky rows
With beady eyes and scratching toes. 

At first they claimed it was our youth that kept 
us in their safe sepulchre. These, he said,
are the tranquillised years. When he left 
though, the days were busy with red cars and words
that tilted their meaning like curious heads.
From breakfast to lunch, lunch to tea, 
The girls fluttered around us, you and me.
Now precious to them after all he’d said.

The shadows slinked down from their eyes and crawled the streets,
The shadows slunk , ink-winged, though the empty city streets,
Scraping the yellow smoke that drifts through lights,
Tugging at the frayed edges of the shifting yellow lights,
The shadows sulked and spun, yellow eyes glinted,
One eye on you, the other on me, perched
On the wires, trees and rooves of flint. 

On the roof they sit in inky rows
With beady eyes and scratching toes.

In the years that came and drifted by, 
the shadows caught and stained our eyes. When he
came back, old and with eight fingers, he asked
us the question. Had we danced?
Could we dance in our sepulchral haven
with mothering gazes ever seeking 
our wasp-waists and vogue fashioned coats?
He was not offered tea but ushered away
from us. We watched his ambling steps on pavement stone,
the shadows drifted behind him.

Above us they caw and scuttled on slate,
mocking our flightless world and drear dim
home that gravely sits on its mounded hill.
Sweet stories rustle through obsidian wings
And we whisper them between us.

The streams of people swim by in savage
servility. Their heads are bent, eyes to their shoes,
their faces buried in the Metro News.
Sometimes a girl with a vacant smile grins,
her head held high and the wind in her hair,
because she does not realise the cliché
that condemns her living. You and I,
we should be more like her. 
Let us be selfish. And dance out
across the street, between the sheep,
and after the man that plays his pipe
and leads us. 


By M.H.Allner
First Posted: Circle of Stars, 30th January 2012 @ 2.22pm